Publish profile files are a new feature of SSDT database projects that enable you to package up all environment-specific properties into a single file for use at publish time; I have written about them before at Publish Profile Files in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and if it wasn’t obvious from that blog post, I’m a big fan!
As I have used ...

Yesterday I was on the lookout for a free tool that would help me write XPath statements. I put a shout out on Twitter and Johan Barnard replied saying :
Give XMLPad a try http://www.wmhelp.com/xmlpad3.htm
I’m sure there are legions of developers out there that know all about XMLPad but I had never heard about it so I suspect some of you ...

A few weeks ago I published a blog entitled Collecting information about your SSIS packages which demonstrated a way that you could use T-SQL and XQuery to derive information about your SSIS packages. Since then I’ve made a few amendments to the script that accompanied that blog post as follows: New columns The collected data now includes the ...

Did you know that is is possible to read the contents of a SSIS package (i.e. a .dtsx file) from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) using T-SQL? For example, take the following T-SQL snippet:
select cast(BulkColumn as XML)from openrowset(bulk 'C:\tmp\MyPkg.dtsx', single_blob) as pkgColumn;
It uses OPENROWSET ...

During the XML Optimization presentation today I'll refer back to the sample code posted at http://www.apress.com/book/downloadfile/4021. I'll also update this post with additional sample code by tomorrow.
UPDATE: The PowerPoint presentation and sample code are attached to this post in the ZIP file.
Jacob Sebastian's book ''The Art of ...